Obama laughs as stars shine at White House

Michael D. Shear

Washington: Five and a half years into President Obama’s time in office, the jokes are getting a bit stale: Fox News is a “shadowy right-wing organisation”. The 47 per cent “called Mitt Romney to apologize”. The whole “Kenyan president” bit.

Mr Obama started his annual remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner with the recognition that the rollout of his health care website could have gone better, admitting that “in 2008, my slogan was ‘Yes, we can!’ In 2013, my slogan was ‘Control-Alt-Delete.’”

“On the plus side,” he continued, “they didn’t turn the launch of HealthCare.gov into one of the year’s biggest movies” (video screens on either side of the president showed the title of the hit Disney film Frozen).

The president finished his remarks by trying to show a farewell video. When it refused to load properly, Mr Obama brought out his “fixer”: Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services, the person most blamed for the botched health insurance website.

Obamacare also gave Mr Obama the chance to tweak his political opponents as he wondered what it would take for Republicans to stop trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act: “What if it gave Mitch McConnell a pulse?” the president asked.

Advertisement

As he does every year, Mr Obama seemed to enjoy calling out Republicans. Taking note of comments on the hue of House Speaker John A Boehner’s skin, Mr Obama noted that he feels sorry for the speaker because some Republicans are harder on Mr Boehner than they are on him.

“Orange really is the new black,” Mr. Obama said.

He also made use of the recent story of a Nevada rancher who had become a conservative hero for standing up for land rights, until he started talking — and quickly drew charges of racism. Mr Obama quipped that Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky had pulled a quick 180 by disinviting the rancher to the dinner.

“As a general rule, things don’t end well if the sentence starts, ‘Let me tell you something I know about the Negro’,” Mr Obama said. “You really don’t need to hear the rest of it. Just a tip for you. Don’t start your sentence that way.”

Mr Obama left little doubt that he harbours just a bit of barely repressed frustration with the reporters who cover him. He let loose a series of zingers aimed at the hundreds of journalists assembled in the giant ballroom at the Washington Hilton.

“I am happy to be here, even though I am a little jet-lagged from my trip to Malaysia,” Mr Obama said as he opened his remarks. “The lengths we have to go to get CNN coverage these days” — a riff on the cable network’s recent focus on the tragedy of a lost airliner from that nation.

Looking out at the vast ballroom, he joked that MSNBC’s reporters were “a little overwhelmed. They’ve never seen an audience this big before.”

The president’s remarks came near the end of a night of celebrity-meets-politics in which 2600 formally dressed movie actors, politicians, singers, journalists, television stars and military officers gathered for their once-a-year party.

Snidely referred to as Washington’s “nerd prom”, the annual correspondents’ dinner masquerades as an oh-so-serious awards ceremony to honour the best of the White House journalists and serve as a fund-raiser for scholarships. (Those things are in fact part of the dinner, which this year celebrated the 100th anniversary of the correspondents’ association.)

But “The Dinner”, as it is known around “This Town”, has become the glitzy anchor for a weekend of parties where the members of Washington’s fourth estate ditch their notebooks and whip out their iPhones to take selfies alongside their sources and a sprinkling of Hollywood A-listers.

In one of the funnier bits of the night, Vice President Joseph Biden and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays a fictional vice president in the HBO comedy Veep, teamed up to produce a video in which the two of them drove around in a bright yellow Corvette, ate ice cream in the White House mess (getting caught by Michelle Obama), and got tattoos with Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House.

On the red carpet at the Washington Hilton, the most famous among the crowd posed for cameras as the not-so-famous ogled. The result was an odd panorama of superstars that would rarely be seen on the way into the Oscars or the Golden Globes.

Bob Schieffer of the CBS News program Face the Nation walked along the carpet behind Patrick Stewart, famous for playing Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, who was being interviewed — without his phaser. A few feet away, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the basketball giant, towered over the crowd. The actress Diane Lane, in a red satin dress, came in on the arm of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Taylor Schilling, star of the Netflix show Orange is the New Black, was dressed in black — apparently the newer black.